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- Portland Press Herald (ME)
March 12, 1998
Marshall H. Bowden, 59, a farmer who was also the longtime director of transportation and maintenance for the Freeport public schools, died unexpectedly Tuesday at a Brunswick hospital.
Mr. Bowden started as a bus driver in Freeport, and within six years he was promoted to superintendent of transportation and maintenance. Since taking over that job in 1968, he scheduled bus routes and saw that the town's school buses were in good repair and had a driver.
''He was serious about his job,'' said his fiancee, Pauline Small. ''If problems arose, he would take charge. He was good at handling people in a way that he wouldn't upset them.''
A self-taught mechanic, he learned out of necessity while growing up in the coastal Maine town of Brooksville in a family of boat builders. ''Up there you do your own work,'' said his daughter, Tammy Doten.
Mr. Bowden was active in the Freeport fire and police departments.
He had always held at least two jobs, said his daughter. For many years he worked on Talbot's dairy farm in South Freeport, with his former wife, Margaret Wentworth. Later he bought a smaller farm on Route 136 and acquired a few head of beef cattle.
The beef cattle were easier to maintain, said Small. ''That gave him more time to devote to the school job.''
''He loved his animals,'' Doten said. ''He would get up at 4:30 a.m. to feed them and take care of them before he headed off to work. He fed the animals again after work, and then did yard work.''
Every year, Mr. Bowden enjoyed traveling to the agricultural fairs all over Maine. One of his favorites was the Blue Hill Fair, near where he grew up.
He enjoyed deer hunting and was a member of the Maine State Cattle Association. Mr. Bowden enjoyed vacationing in Florida and also going to auto races at the tracks in Loudon, N.H., and Oxford Plains.
Born in Castine, a son of Horace and Barbara Conden Bowden, he graduated from Brooksville High School in 1956, the only boy in a graduating class of 12 students.
As a young man he worked at a summer camp, and in the family's boat building business.
Surviving are his mother, Barbara Conden Bowden of Freeport; four daughters, Karen Mathias of Goshen, Ind., Tammy Doten of South Freeport, Robin Dunnett of Cumberland and Wendy Pesce of Mt. Pleasant, S.C.; two sisters, Jeanne Brown of West Palm Beach, Fla., and Cheryl Sedgwick of Topsham; and 10 grandchildren.
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1939 - 1998 (59 years)
[1] 
